False Impressions

by Laura Caldwell

  Bunny Loveland answered immediately. “Yeah?”

  “Bunny, it’s Izzy,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, but this time there was the slightest touch of excitement in her voice. “Whatcha got goin’ girl?”

  “Umm, I’m…”

  “What are you calling me for?” Classic Bunny Loveland. And her hostility, based in love I knew, always made me feel better.

  “I just wanted to say hi,” I said. “See what’s going on.”

  Bunny Loveland was the housekeeper my mother hired when we moved to Chicago. I was eight and my brother, Charlie, five. My mom thought Bunny was going to be the maternal type. She certainly looked the type with her curled gray hair. She seemed a sturdy woman who didn’t fluster easily. Well, she was that, but she certainly wasn’t the maternal type. Bunny was one of those people to whom you didn’t ask a question unless you really wanted an answer.

  And for decades, nothing much had been going on in Bunny’s life since an inheritance from a distant relative allowed her to quit cleaning and doing “other peoples’ child caring.” Her home in West Lincoln Park—a squat, old brown cottage on Schubert Avenue—was overgrown with trees and hadn’t been painted since the early seventies. It was one of those places the neighbors wanted to torch in the middle of the night.

  “I bought a bar,” she said.

  “What?” Bunny was in her late seventies and rarely left her house. Bunny didn’t go to bars, much less own them. “You bought a bar?”

  “Yep. You know that place a few blocks from me on Southport?” Her voice bore its usual strongly graveled tone.

  In my mind, I strolled Bunny’s neighborhood. “You mean the place next to the vacuum cleaner store?” I asked. That bar was a decrepit old place, with a bulletproof frosted window. There was no way to look inside from the street.

  I liked dive bars—really, really liked them. But even I was a bit freaked out by that particular place. It had never had a name that anyone knew. And not in the way that Saga’s secret place didn’t have a name. If I was thinking of the right one, the bar only had a sign that said Old Style, as if Really, what else is there to say?

  I described the sign to Bunny.

  “That’s the place,” Bunny said. “And I need some customers. Bring some suckers in tonight.”

  64

  I didn’t know any suckers, but I needed to get my mind off Madeline’s case and I knew someone who probably felt guilty enough to meet me at a really crappy bar on a Monday.

  “Hey,” Vaughn said when I called the station. I almost said, We answer my calls, do we? But I realized it was a good sign that he’d done so.

  I gave him the basics of Bunny and her new bar. “What time do they let you leave there?” I used the word let in order to stir up what I now knew was a dislike for his job.

  And it worked.

  “I leave when I want to,” he said.

  “Great. I’ll see you there at seven.”

  I stepped into Bunny’s bar at six forty-five. I’d gone early to catch up with Bunny. She was behind the bar, her gray hair looking like she might have had it colored and set at the shop recently. And Bunny was laughing.

  Now that was something I’d seen only a few times before.

  It took one or two steps for me to realize who she was laughing with—Vaughn.

  She saw me, waved at the bar stool near Vaughn and kept talking. “Sure, I knew Gacy!”

  I gripped the bar when the stool’s rickety legs felt like they might give away.

  “I went to a few parties at his place,” she said.

  “Hi,” Vaughn said to me, smiling, then looking back at Bunny. “C’mon,” he said.

  “Seriously!” Bunny said.

  “You guys aren’t talking about John Wayne Gacy, are you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, my husband and I knew him.”

  She and Vaughn chatted a little more—just light, Chicago bar chat about one of the most prolific serial killers in history. Bunny put an Old Style draft in front of me, without asking what I wanted, then went to the end of the bar to help a lone patron. Vaughn had a mug of the same beer in front of him.

  “Cheers,” I said, raising my drink.

  He clinked glasses with me. “Cheers.”

  Two hours later, there was barely a lull in the conversation. Who knew how fun it could be to hang with Vaughn? He had a million stories, of course, about criminals, both stupid and chillingly smart. We now knew a number of the same people since I worked in criminal defense. We traded stories and laughed our asses off.

  “You know,” I said to him, “you’re exhibiting another trait of a lawyer.”

  “What’s that?” He looked interested.

  “War stories. We love telling ’em.”

  “Ah, that’s a cop thing, too.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A lot of the stories you’ve been telling me end up in the same place.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “With you in court.”

  Vaughn thought about it. “Huh,” he said. “I guess that’s true.” He took a sip of beer. “Huh.” He looked at me. “You’re pretty smart.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And you’re pretty cool.”

  “Thanks.”

  A pause.

  “Is this your way of hitting on me as an alternative to arresting me?” I asked.

  He looked like he might be pissed off, then decided to let it go. He laughed. “Yeah. How’s it going for you?”

  I thought about it. “Good,” I said. “I’m giving you good reviews.”

  “Yeah? And so what would you recommend I do now?”

  I looked at him. And I can’t believe what I said next. “I’d recommend that you kiss me.”

  65

  Bunny eventually kicked us out.

  “This is not why I opened a bar,” she said, exasperated.

  We’d been smooching on and off at the bar for at least thirty minutes by then. Time had taken on a weird quality, and I had to distract myself from pondering the bizarro-ness of it all. I’d never kissed three different people in the span of only a few weeks, and who would have thought one of them would be a woman. Or that I would ever kiss Vaughn?

  I knew part of me was feeling rejected by Madeline’s cold behavior after what we’d shared. But damn, the guy could kiss, and so Vaughn was definitely helping matters.

  “And you,” Bunny said, disapprovingly, shaking her head at Vaughn, as if to say, I expected more.

  “Hey,” he said to her. “Now that we’re friends, I’m always at your service. Always.”

  “Yeah,” I said, standing and slipping my arm into my coat. “He’s got a lot of friends who own bars, and he’ll do anything for them. Like arrest people for really ridiculous reasons.” I laughed.

  But Vaughn didn’t. Oops. I had taken it too far.

  But then, slowly, like it was difficult for him, he smiled. He leaned down, mouth to my ear. “I want to get you out of here.”

  He put a fifty-dollar bill on the bar for Bunny.

  “Congratulations on the bar,” I said to her.

  “Thanks, girl.” When Vaughn turned his back to pick up his coat, she pointed at him, winked, smiled and nodded.

  Vaughn had been granted the rarely seen Bunny stamp of approval.

  66

  Vaughn had a laserlike focus for finding cabs. Outside Bunny’s bar, in a little-traveled block of Southport, it was like Vaughn could smell them.

  “There!” he said, pointing two blocks away to a cab with its lights on. He took my hand, as if it were natural for him to do so, and pulled me to walk faster toward the cab. When the cabbie blinked his lights to let us know he’d seen us, we slowed.

  In the cab, Vaughn said, “Where?”

  And I don’t know if it was the blonde or redhead in me, or some combination of the two, but somebody leaned forward and gave my address to the driver.

  It took forever to get inside my condo. Because we kept making out on the stairs.<
br />
  I’d take a few steps up, he’d make an inappropriate (and really sexy) comment about my ass. I’d take a few more and his hand might touch the back of my thigh. Just for a moment. I’d take a few steps more and I would cave.

  I would turn, lean down and kiss him. And soon he was leaning over me. One time I sat on his lap. Each time we kissed and kissed and held ourselves together in a tight knot of arms and legs. Then one of us would be an adult and say, Okay, let’s go.

  But then the cycle would begin all over again.

  Finally, we were inside my living room. I playfully pushed him onto the couch. He landed, his mouth open, his eyes looking at me like this was the best night of his life.

  I fell on the couch next to him, letting myself lean into his weight, and God did that feel nice.

  This time our kissing was going somewhere. There was nothing but us now—no bar or cab or stairwell. Nothing but our mouths and our faces and our necks, and, of course, our bodies, nearly twitching for each other.

  My phone had rung inside my purse a few times on our way up the stairs. Now someone was calling again. And again. And again. It was messing with my beer buzz and the completely unexpected delight named Damon Vaughn.

  The phone rang again. I growled. “Sorry,” I said.

  I stood, noticing my sweater was halfway up my rib cage. I looked at the phone. Mayburn.

  “What?” I said.

  “Why are you answering like that?” he said.

  “Please tell me what you need.” I glanced back at Vaughn. He was panting ever so slightly.

  “I need you to go to the gallery. Tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m starting to wonder if you’re right. I’m starting to think it could be Saga.”

  67

  Flushed and flustered, I’d smoothed my hair and gave Vaughn an I’m sorry look while I listened to Mayburn talk.

  He summarized some things we’d learned about the case. “We need to know why she’s been in the gallery at night,” he concluded.

  “To see if she had opportunity to get things out of there.”

  “Yeah. It’s been bugging me. You said she was in there on a Saturday night, wearing different clothes from earlier. That’s been scratching at me, so I looked at the video.”

  “And?”

  “Remember how I told you that the back entry doesn’t appear on the video feed from the security cameras.”

  “Yeah. Madeline said the previous owners installed it, mostly to show cars that were blocking access to the delivery door.”

  “Right.”

  “You think Madeline knows that, and knows how to leave the building with a piece of art without being picked up by her cameras?”

  “Maybe. But I’d guess the security guard has a whole different set of shots.”

  “From the building’s video system.”

  “Right. He probably sits there in the foyer and watches all sorts of video from different angles. We need to know what he knows. You gotta talk to him while Madeline isn’t there.”

  “What if this is one of the nights she is in there? Should I say I wanted to review the shipping manifests again?” I’d had no luck reviewing those documents yet, but I hadn’t gotten to explain that to Madeline since she’d essentially told me to leave the gallery.

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  I hung up and turned to Vaughn. “Duty calls.”

  “What kind of duty?”

  “Just work,” I said, because I wasn’t about to confide anything in Vaughn, and also I liked the way he seemed to think of me as mysterious.

  I said goodbye to him on the front stoop of my place. There was no wind, and Eugenie Street felt perfectly still—a snow globe with no snow.

  “So this…” He nodded at me. “This is pretty good.”

  “Yes.”

  We hugged. He held me very close.

  “I’m going to want to see you,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I got in a cab. And when he was gone, when I could no longer see his form on the corner, I missed him.

  68

  The security guard was nice, like always. I brought up his wife’s tamales; he told me that she’d won a cook-off contest with them. I tried to channel Vaughn. Now that I didn’t hate him, I could actually see and imagine good things about him. How would he get this guard to talk?

  It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Doormen (and women) are prized for their ability to remain friendly and seem open without divulging anything about their residents.

  I figured Vaughn would be straight with him. What had he told me about talking to gangbangers? Everyone deserves respect, or something to that effect. I could almost hear him saying, Tell it to the guard straight, but give as little information as you have to. Don’t contaminate the scene. Use your brain.

  After we chatted about the tamales, I got out my keys and made like I was going to open the gallery door, reminding the security guard that I had a certain amount of cred there. “Hey,” I said, turning back to him. “Thanks for being so great with us while we’ve been so busy lately.”

  “Sure, that’s my job.” He smiled jovially at me.

  “It must be hard to do the night shift.”

  He shrugged. “Well, I got a family. Kids. You know. And I miss them. But this is my job.”

  “Yeah, sure. I just know Madeline really appreciates it.”

  He nodded at me, pleased.

  “Madeline works really hard, too,” I added.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “She’s a businesswoman. You got to.”

  “I know, but I always tell her, don’t work so much at night, you know? I don’t want her to run herself into the ground.”

  The guard made an agreeable face, as if to say, Maybe you got a point.

  I was thinking of a way to ask him if Madeline had been coming to the gallery at night, other than this past Saturday, but he spoke again. “Hey, there she is now.”

  He was looking down. I took a few light steps toward him. I craned my neck to see that he was pointing at live video feeds. As Mayburn had said, they showed different areas around the building. The one he specifically was pointing to showed the back entrance. And sure enough, on the screen, there was Madeline Saga, pulling keys out of a fur coat she was wearing. She opened the door and stepped inside.

  Oh, my gosh. What should I do? My thoughts ran around in circles.

  But then I halted the scrambling mental activity. Wait a minute. This all seemed too easy. I’d come to see if Madeline spent much time at the gallery at night, and now there she was? Why did I feel like I was being set up?

  I was about to make up some excuse and leave, maybe try calling Madeline from a cab and see if she willingly told me she was in the gallery.

  But something on the screen caught my eye. Someone.

  Someone was following Madeline in the back entrance of the gallery.

  My eyes darted to the Madeline on the screen. She wasn’t looking back, just moving forward as if unaware of the presence so close behind her.

  Madeline! I wanted to yell.

  I leaned forward. Who was that behind her? The person was small, about Madeline’s size.

  Still, I wanted to yell out, Madeline! Be careful…

  I looked at the guard. He cocked his head, but his gaze shifted again to a different screen, clearly not alarmed.

  I returned my gaze to the screen. And what I saw made me blink a few times.

  What I appeared to see was…

  I leaned in farther.

  What my eyes thought they saw was that the person following Madeline inside was…Madeline?

  The security guard buzzed in another business owner and greeted them.

  I leaned in again, peering.

  I knew I’d just seen Madeline open the back door and step inside. But there she was on the screen, taking hold of the open door and stepping inside again. And she wasn’t wearing a fur coat.

  What was going on here?

  There
were, I realized then, two of them.

  69

  “Uh, yeah, good,” I said to the security guard, moving fast to the gallery’s front door again. “There’s Madeline. Right on time to meet me. Good to see you.”

  I slipped the keys in quietly and opened the door. I closed it behind me and a silence settled over the place. In the back room, a light went on.

  I heard no sounds.

  I took one step, then another. I noticed absently how different the artwork was in the dark—some pieces losing their power, others containing a deep creepiness that hadn’t been there before.

  I took another few steps. I heard something.

  I stopped. Faint murmuring.

  I took a few more steps. Two women talking. But then I knew that—two women. Yet why did both of them appear to be Madeline Saga?

  The murmuring grew louder as I crept toward the back.

  When I peeked in from the front room, the only person I saw was Madeline. In her fur coat.

  I bent over farther and saw someone else holding a wood crate, the kind people sent paintings in. And that person…again…that person was…Madeline?

  “What in the hell?” I said.

  When they both looked at me, I realized I’d said it out loud.

  70

  “We are twins,” Madeline said.

  I looked back and forth between the two of them. The other woman was quiet as Madeline spoke.

  Madeline told me she’d come to the gallery the night before. She had been thinking about Jacqueline, feeling bad that Jacqueline was so twisted up about this—about her—and yet not quite believing that Jacqueline could have sent the knife sculpture. Or really wanted harm to come to Madeline.

  Madeline had gotten out of bed. She’d left her house. She planned to pull out the shipping manifests for me and leave them in case I came in early. She was glad that Mayburn and I wanted to go over the information again. Madeline knew, she said, that we hadn’t quite seen the whole of the situation yet.

  And although, as a lover of art, she’d gotten adept at noticing perspective and vantage point, she had a distinct sense that our view and hers was too narrow.